Hussein Samatar, a Minneapolis school board member who has been considering a mayoral bid, announced today on Facebook that he has been diagnosed with a form of leukemia.

Samatar did not say if or how the illness would influence his decision whether to run for mayor this fall.

UPDATE: Samatar told me this morning he hasn’t yet ruled out a bid, but acknowledged that the timing of his illness couldn’t be worse.

“I would have liked by now to be campaigning,” Samatar said. “Had I not been diagnosed, I would have announced by Feb. 1. Therefore, everything is up in the air. The only race I need to win is my life.”

The founder and director of the African Development Center was diagnosed in December with chronic lymphocytic leukemia — a kind of cancer of the blood and bone marrow — and has gone through three rounds of chemotherapy.

Doctors have found Samatar a match for a bone marrow transplant, which he expects to receive sometime over the next couple of months.

“As you know, I am civil-war survivor,” he wrote on his Facebook page. “There are days that I feel great and there are days that I feel terrible. But in the end I am determined to defeat this disease and I have worked hard to maintain a normal schedule during my illness including not missing a school board meeting since the diagnoses.”